176 POPULAR GEOGRAPHY OF PLANTS. 



trace of them is visible, while the whole bush has burst into 

 a blaze of glittering splendour." 



There are some very attractive-looking plants, natives of 

 Southern Africa, to be sometimes met with in hothouses, 

 which would deceive us at first sight into thinking that the 

 flowers have a brilliant scarlet corolla; but on looking 

 closer we find that what we took for a corolla is composed 

 of coloured bracts, assuming the appearance of petals, en- 

 circling the stamens and pistils, which plainly bespeak these 

 plants to be of the Spurge tribe (Ev/phorbiacea) . The 

 beauty and excellence of the Constantia Grapes at the Cape 

 of Good Hope is a fact well known to all. Most of the 

 cultivated greenhouse Geraniums, as they are called, are 

 also amongst the beauties of vegetation there : botanists 

 call them Pelargoniums ; the chief points which distinguish 

 them from Geraniums being that they have seven stamens 

 instead of ten, the flowers very irregular in form, and one 

 of the divisions of the calyx extended into a nectariferous 

 tube; the creeping ivy-leaved Geranium is perhaps one of 

 the commonest. "The golden-flowered Mimosa too, and 

 the deliciously-scented Cape Jessamine, combine with the 

 Geraniums in imparting a peculiarly distinctive character to 

 the woods ; while the long ringlets of grey moss or lichen 



